A. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to automatic document sorting machines, and more particularly, to machines suitable for automatically sorting retail store coupons or the like.
B. Description of the Prior Art
Automatic document sorting devices are known. Such devices are generally specialized for reading particular types of documents, such as mail, currency, checks and bar coded merchandise tags. Consequently, such reading machines are designed to read specialized data associated with such articles, such as magnetic ink present on checks, bar codes present on merchandise tags and certain classes of mail, and the particular portions of currency indicating the denomination.
While such devices operate satisfactorily for sorting documents having certain predetermined characteristics and relatively uniform size, these devices are generally incapable of reading documents such as store coupons that have a variety of shapes and sizes, but which may otherwise be difficult to differentiate from each other. Consequently, the sorting of merchandising coupons is usually done manually.
One of the problems associated with present day redeemable merchandising coupons is the amount of handling required in the redemption process. Firstly, the coupon must be manually redeemed at the point of sale by a retailer, who subsequently sorts the redeemed coupons and sends them to the manufacturer issuing the coupon or to a clearing house. When the coupons are received by the clearing house, they are manually read and sorted, and the account of the retailer submitting the coupons is credited with the aggregate value of the coupons plus an appropriate handling charge, while the various manufacturers' accounts are debited. In addition, a report is submitted to certain manufacturers indicating the number and value of coupons redeemed, the origin of the redeemed coupons (i.e., whether they originated in a newspaper, magazine or box top), the regions of the country in which the coupons were redeemed and other information.
The manual handling of coupons requires a considerable amount of time, both at the point of sale and at the clearing house. At the point of sale, the coupon must be visually inspected and a determination made as to whether the product called for by the coupon was purchased. The coupons must then be sorted and sent to the appropriate manufacturers or clearing houses. At the clearing house, the coupons are again visually inspected to determine if they are valid (e.g., unexpired) and sorted according to offers. After the coupons have been sorted according to offers, the coupons relating to each offer are counted, and the appropriate reports are generated.
Typically, each manufacturer has a large number of offers outstanding relating to various products and to various sizes and flavors of that product. In addition, different offers are made by publishing similar coupons in various magazines, newspapers and other publications. When this is done, the manufacturer usually desires to know the origin of each coupon in order to determine the effectiveness of his advertising campaign. Therefore, coupons relating to the same product which appear in different publications are typically segregated under different offers, each being identified by a different offer number. The number of separate offers is quite large, and each coupon must be segregated according to offer. This requires a rather complicated segregation process that requires each coupon to be handled twice, that is, first during the inspection process in which the coupons are segregated according to offers, and then during a counting process where the coupons relating to each offer are counted. Such a duplication of handling is time consuming and expensive; however, to date, no automatic sorting device capable of handling a large number of diverse coupons having a wide variety of physical characteristics and at the same time being able to differentiate between virtually identical coupons from different offers has been developed.